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Six decades in, and I’m still impatient and irascible.
I’ve always been driven—fiery, goal-oriented, some would say intense.
In these mellowing years, the fire has changed. I burn more evenly, more deliberately—circumspect, creative, and flexible. Rageful outbursts are farther apart and less frequent, and I cool off quicker.
Genetics, aging, and weariness with the world whirl within me like the double helix that designed me, twisting, twirling, and swirling my moods. Time has not snuffed out the flames but has taught me temperance.
I attribute my ornery-ness to my father, who didn’t believe in the glass, let alone seeing it half empty. I inherited the volatility of his frustrations and thwarted dreams.
And as the world ebbs and flows in compassion and cruelty—more so the latter, lately—my nervous system leaps too easily into fight or flight over the day’s atrocity, leaving not even a breath’s pause to reflect.
Yes, I have choices: be the candle, standing tall and straight, or bend and break to reshape myself for the times—risk safety speaking out for peace and the victims of arbitrary violence against make-believe enemies, or lay low, stay quiet.
I do both—cooling and heating in response to external stimuli; both are necessary for a healthy balance between conflagration and containment.
Reshaping the Fire Inside
In yoga, twisting is like wringing out the wash, a physical and emotional digestion. Emotional goo rises to the surface and occasionally a yoga student cries, maybe more than occasionally, though dimly lit studios allow yogi(ni)s to experience their practice in privacy.
We practice yoga to push, pull, twist, turn—strengthening and stretching, opening the body along every axis of the spine, reaching to the edges of our perimeters: how tall, squat, arced, and twisted we can be.
We cleanse the mala with Agni—practice burns away what is no longer necessary, leaving what is essential.
With Ujjayi breath, sustained balance, coordinated breath-to-movement, concentration, and asana, we regulate heat and open ourselves to the freedom and confinements of nature’s laws—gravity, for one; we dance along its edges and dare its theory.
And sometimes, we strike a pose against the laws of man.
Human Time is Illusory.
A fire burns in the living room, its wine-colored-smoked-with-grey marble façade brims teasingly with the threat of smoke curling under the lip of the flue. Our family room smells of smoke and pine, roast turkey and stewed apples. The weather outside is unusually cool for us thin-blooded Californians, a chill 45 degrees. We warm our bodies near the rising flames
Agni is the fire within, the fireplace of the corporeal and noncorporeal being. The fireplace is the hearth and heart and home, burning matter into gas, transforming Earth’s elements.
Breath is transformation, too: oxygen intake transmutes gas to cellular energy, released as carbon dioxide and moisture; cells silently transmute gases into energy. We are slow-burning transformers.
Food becomes nourishment and waste. Thought becomes mood. Emotion becomes action. Twists stoke the fire within, the one that digests food, emotions, and ideas. Agni produces Prana—life force—what animates the meat we are.
We scorch time, or so it seems.
The living room is gone, and the people in it have moved on. My children live elsewhere now, the earned independence of growing wiser, more competent, and able. They have their own fires to burn within and without.
Our family’s arms stretch south to north across the longest state of the union, but the burning continues, love, bonds, connections, simmering within, like guiding lights, reasons to be, sometimes.
Their absence rouses a gentle longing, shifting the flow of emotion and mood, cool to warm. I roll out my mat and do my practice.
Yoga cooks the system, releasing impurities. Afterward, clarity arrives. I recognize my gifts: family and friends, rewarding work, and robust health. Grateful for winning the lottery of life, I warm and surrender.
And then the tide shifts again.
Just when I think I’m out of explosive fuel, I’m fired up about the careless driver, the rude coffee shop customer on their speaker phone, or the entitled student who demands exceptions to course deadlines. I take a breath.
Sputtering Out of Rage to the Finish Line
Discourtesies fray my nerves. “I’m old,” I think, outgrowing the world as my own parents did—angry at feeling out of place, not belonging.
In a society built on production and consumption, those no longer hardy consumers, the AARP generation, are quietly ignored, sometimes overtly dismissed, and shunned by dull stares, inaudible sighs, and eyeball rolls. An angry older adult is waved away with an eye roll or an “Okay, Boomer,” disregarded as crotchety and inconvenient.
Retribution. I once thought the same of my aging parents.
Still, the fire burns within me, and I am often imbalanced in a world that demands much and returns little. When young, I believed I could tip the scales in my favor: work, push, grind harder, and reap the rewards, money, relationships, and parenthood. Sometimes it worked. Often it did not. In the end, I learned that things come to pass as they will, despite how fiercely we blaze through life.
Winning and losing as a zero-sum game makes no sense in my 60s. I know that no one loses because someone wins, and losses and wins scale with what is sought.
I won legal cases, soccer games, arguments, and power struggles—and lost money, skin, friends, and respect. You win some, you lose some, but mostly you compromise.
The Race is Won by…There is No Race.
Life is cycles—waves, undulating grass in the warm breeze, simmering beneath a blazing sun, or cooling in morning dew. Vibrant blades lie dormant, conserving their energy and resources until spring’s showers nourish them, only to face summer’s scalding, when self-preservation kicks in.
I am dying. We are all dying; my death may be closer than most if calendars are real. I cannot spin wheels to death’s door. I have ample resources, but how do I want to expend them over a finite number of years?
Slowing down the sizzle and burn by preserving what I have and patiently practicing for the end, acquainting myself with death, is my game plan—as much as I can plan.
I don’t care to know what death is, but how to die.
My mother fought the insult of death, sucked air in to wring out the last drop—for hours, huffing and puffing as if there was no end. My father went to sleep, inhaled, and simply did not exhale. He willed his death weeks, months, years before. My neglected mother fought from birth for the privilege of living; my male-privileged father opted out of the drudgery decades before his departure.
Their spirits are reflected in their lives and deaths. I’ve got my mother’s optimism and my father’s anger. How shall I die?
However it will be, it will be a mirror. My death will heal others, my children with their guilt and fear, but mostly it will be private, intimate, and quiet, an introverted death. And if I can, continue thinning the edges, paring them back from attachment and aversion before then.
A low simmer, the woodpile’s embers, the dusky light, these are byproducts of the decades’ hysterical laughter, primal screams, bitter tears, and blank stares—the boiling that precedes the low fire to finish off the culinary creation. So may I end in an after-raucous mad surging to controlled heat, keeping the energy distributed over time until the dish is ready to be served.
I am a plated serving, ready to be devoured, completed—a breath in, breath out, sailing the settling sunset seas in between inhalation and exhalation.
We Live in the Gaps—We are the Gap.
The fire inside arcs skyward at times, oxygenated by the highest finger of my tree branches, sky-bound. Sometimes it’s the blue flame—the hottest point—fueled by attachment, aversion, the future, the past, all but the present. And the orange flames, flourishing and expanding, like diaphragmatic breaths, burn the edges, alchemizing a center that is clear, cool, and calm.
Even the raging fires that devastate thousands of acres of forest, wildlife, and precious homes, when all one’s accumulations—memories, limestone bathrooms, Roman sculptures, preserved baby blankets, heirlooms, wedding dresses—turn to ash, are inevitably extinguished.
Prana drifts, ignites another soul, another life to breathe life into, engulf in flames, rake the embers, and let cool to stillness.
Peter Brannen, author of C02 is the Story of Everything, compares burning coal and respiration as “a very slow combustion process,” later concluding that in the end, “respiration and burning are equivalent; the slight delay in the middle is what we know as life,” between striking the match and blowing it out.
Yes, life is the burning. Our daily practice—asana, pranayama, dhyana—heats us, and then, stillness. What’s left? After the anger and ecstasy, tapas steadies us, two feet together, one stepping forward from the past, the other back from the future.
In a season, an hour, we live, breathe, and die, again and again. We, the mountains, rise and submerge eternally.
Yoga is the one constant. For thousands of years, it has been a vehicle to emblazon the truth in skin, neurons, and muscles so that we can be the compassion we need, the salve, and emanate compassion to the world. Yoga teaches us to be patient and kind, to have grace for ourselves and others.
Breathe, pause, the stillness at the bottom of the exhale before inhaling, the reaching for the skies before floating to the earth in a forward fold, suspended space and time—of the moment—it’s where life is lived, in the gaps.
My fury is the extinguishing light and the fever ecstasy of protons in frenzied friction against past folded into future into present, spinning, endlessly turning, tilting, and tunneling time—and then, motionless—the opening in between.
Some name that sacred space nirvana, the glimpse of a life spinning, twisting, and folding before the ultimate pause, inhale.
But I will not rage before the dying light—that is a story for the living. For that final breath, I practice stillness, infinite peace in the pause.
Until then, I smolder—contained, nurtured, and alive—in the gap.
~
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